One person’s bad luck turned into a greater scandal than expected at a recently opened Microcenter after purchasing the flagship RTX 5090. Reddit user JamesFerg650 (1, 2) went to the soft-opening at the Santa Clara store and happily walked out with a brand new Zotac RTX 5090 Solid OC, only to find out once they got home that something was horribly amiss. The proud owner of the premier and costly, even at physical store prices, GPU found backpacks inside the factory-sealed box when they got home, and unfortunately by the time they got home, the store was now closed but not all was lost because after all, Microcenter does have a great reputation for customer service.
Microcenter proceeded to do its own investigation after being contacted and found not one, or two, or even a few more missing cards, but thirty-one boxes that had their prized GPUs removed. All of these were factory-sealed as well and showed no sign of external tampering. At $2,699.99 MSRP, this tally comes to over $83,000. Phone calls were made, emails sent, and apparently a supplier in China is to blame, and now Zotac is investigating the supplier as well. Meanwhile, Microcenter has replaced the GPU for the unlucky purchaser.
“Justin the General Manager, Joseph the Operations Manager and Youseff (sorry if I spelled your name wrong) the Sales manager were all waiting for me when I showed up this afternoon and exchanged my card with zero hassle.”
-JamesFerg650
Before:
After:
For those wondering why it wasn’t so easy to tell that something wasn’t right by the weight of the original box, it was determined that the backpacks only weighed around half a pound less than the actual GPU. Someone claiming to be a Microcenter employee has posted on one of the threads that this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. They stated there was a situation with some prebuilt PCs, which were discovered to have tiles in them. While risks are somewhat inherently expected with online orders most folks wouldn’t think twice about what’s inside a box when they walk out of a big-box store, but perhaps they should be given the state of things when it comes to premium PC parts.